Today's brain imaging capabilities owe a lot to the University's Kamil Ugurbil, who was just elected to the national Institute of Medicine.

Outstanding in his fields

Kamil Ugurbil, a pioneer in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is elected to national Institute of Medicine

By Nick Hanson

November 27, 2007

When Kamil Ugurbil joined the University of Minnesota in 1982,
he didn't even have an office on the Twin Cities campus. Instead,
the young assistant professor of biochemistry was stationed on the
shores of Lake Minnetonka, at the Gray Freshwater Biological
Institute. At the institute, established by the University for the
study of lake biology, his skills with magnetic resonance
spectroscopy were useful for monitoring metabolism in living
bacteria. But Ugurbil didn't limit himself to the study of
bacteria. Today he is the director and founder of the Center for
Magnetic Resonance and Research (CMRR), a key interdisciplinary
building used by researchers from nearly every medical field at the
University. During the 25 years since Ugurbil arrived here, he and
his colleagues in CMRR have developed techniques and machines that
help researchers view the inside of human and nonhuman animal
bodies through noninvasive, high-powered magnetic scans, and he has
become a legend in the field of MRI. In October, Ugurbil was
recognized for his achievements by being inducted into the
Institute of Medicine. Established in 1970 by the National Academy
of Sciences, IOM boasts a roster of the nation's top medical
scientists. Getting into the IOM is no small feat. Members are
elected through a highly selective process that recognizes people
who have made major contributions to the advancement of the medical
sciences, health care, and public health. Election is considered
one of the highest honors in the fields of medicine and health.
"It's a great honor to be recognized by your peers," Ugurbil said.
"This is very important for a scientist. It's one of the most
important rewards."

Stronger fields, higher stakes

After life on Lake Minnetonka, Ugurbil moved to campus and created
the CMRR--first located near Coffman Union, now on the outskirts of
campus--and began work with even more powerful magnets. "We were
able to obtain fantastic information in the living animal," he
says, "but we wanted to do [MRI] on humans."

"The scientific community has jumped into the
game," Ugurbil says. "In the last two years, the type of
instrumentation and research capability we pioneered has
exploded."

And that's exactly what Ugurbil and his colleagues did. The
University of Minnesota CMRR was one of the three institutions
across the world to receive, for the first time, a 4 Tesla system
capable of accommodating human scans at a time when MRI in humans
was carried out at 1.5 Tesla. (The Tesla is a unit of magnetic
field strength; a 5 Tesla magnet would have 100,000 times the
strength of Earth's magnetic field.) Because high magnetic fields
are not easy to work with, the consensus in the scientific field
was that human imaging at 4 Tesla would be "scientific suicide,"
Ugurbil says. Sure enough, he and his CMRR colleagues were one of
the two teams that independently and concurrently performed the
first functional brain scan and presented images of the brain at
work. This allowed researchers to better investigate how the normal
brain functions and to use these methods to study mental illness.
That monumental achievement thrust the CMRR into the spotlight. By
1993, CMRR housed a first-of-its-kind 9.4 Tesla system for animal
research; in 1999 it received its first 7 Tesla human system, and
it now possesses one of the world's three 9.4 Tesla systems for
work with humans. The next step will be getting a 16.4 Tesla magnet
for research animals. Ugurbil is confident the center will be home
to one within the next year and a half. Looking back, Ugurbil says
the University should be proud of its history in biomedical
imaging. "We have developed a lot of the techniques and applied
them to neurosciences, tumor biology, cardiac function, and
others," he says. "It has been a very successful effort, and a very
important one." Many of those whom Ugurbil mentored at the
University of Minnesota are now at other universities and research
institutions, practicing the techniques they learned and helped
develop at CMRR. And the scientific field of magnetic resonance
imaging continues to grow. "The scientific community has jumped
into the game," Ugurbil says. "In the last two years, the type of
instrumentation and research capability we pioneered has exploded."
Yet there's no doubt, when it comes to neuroimaging, the University
of Minnesota CMRR and Ugurbil are still the reigning kings.